Living Legend Willem Dafoe Truly Has The Perfect Response To Be Fan Cast As Joker So Often

• Willem Dafoe is widely considered to be one of the greatest actors of his generation.
• He’s also become something of a meme legend, as GQ wrote a whole article about him being called “Willem Dripfoe” or “Willem Da Goat” on TikTok.
• Naturally, when addressing fans wanting to see him play Joker while on SNL, Dafoe had the perfect response.

Now 66-years-old, four-time Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe is arguably now more famous than he’s ever been during his four-decade-long career thanks to the mindblowing popularity of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which only served to put more eyeballs on his storied filmography.

From The Last Temptation of Christ to Mississippi Burning, from Platoon to American Psycho, from Spider-Man to Finding Nemo (he’s Gil!) to John Wick, Dafoe has appeared in some iconic films over the years and is still doing so at an extraordinary clip as he’s in the midst of a five-film run that includes The French Dispatch, The Card Counter, Nightmare Alley, the aforementioned No Way Home, and this spring’s The Northman, which will likely the best out of all those films.

Dafoe’s also achieved a different kind of fame recently, as he’s become something of a meme legend in the last five years or so. Just Google “Willem Dafoe meme” and see how many different results there are.

This is all relevant because it explains why, at 66-years-old, Dafoe appeared as the host of Saturday Night Live for the first time in his career, where he addressed having fans casting him in the role of Joker for a good twenty years now:

“I’m not one of those subtle actors like Nicolas Cage or Al Pacino,” Dafoe joked. “Maybe that’s why people come up to me and say, ‘You know what role you’d be perfect for? The Joker’. Always nice to hear that you’ve got the vibe of a sociopath.”

Dafoe certainly has been publically discussing the role quite a bit lately, as he recently told GQ — in the same interview that discusses his newfound  “Willem Da Drip” fame — that he “fantasized” about playing a version of the character:

For years, people have been telling him he’s the perfect man for the role, and it got him thinking. “There is something interesting about, like, if there was a Joker imposter. So it would be possible to have not dueling Jokers but someone that says to be the Joker that isn’t the Joker. And that kind of opens up the possibility of an interesting story, particularly if you had Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, and then you had someone who was either imitating or riffing off what he did. I fantasized about that. But other than that I am not talking to anybody [about it], you’re the first one.” [via GQ]

As mentioned above, Dafoe will next star in Robert Eggers’ (The Witch, The Lighthouse) in The Northman alongside Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, and Anya Taylor-Joy. And surprise, surprise: it looks incredible.

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